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“A wise robot once said to me through Serial.println- that robots teach us about ourselves.”

making new creatures

Timeline of Events, Science Fair (Day 3)

4:45 AM – 1234 by Feist! Woowoo! Stayed in bed because I was having a dream about talking to Robbie, have to finish the conversation…

4:50 AM – Awake

5:00 AM – Watch goes off! It gets louder as time passes.

5:09 AM – So, I played around with Arduino on Xcode on my other laptop last night. I’m figuring that the speaking character view, the one that makes Robbie open and close his mouth, could have a pipe which would lead to the terminal so it could go something like
cd theDirectory
make upload
Which would upload the program onto the Arduino.
I’m not exactly sure yet how I’ll have it talking … a wire running out of the back of the stuffed animal to the computer doesn’t sound like a good idea to me :S Maybe I’ll get a bluetooth Arduino and a small wireless microphone. So really, you could have a server farm (hacked Apple TV) in one room, with a big USB hub and multiple Robbies open so that many people in one room can converse with their open copy of Robbie. Only problem would be getting the Apple speech event handler to not be confused, esp as it blocks out all other applications. Maybe I could have Robbie record the sound (speech), then ‘parse’ it. While the computer would be processing, the stuffed penguin would move its arms up and down… hopefully the processing time wouldn’t be too long! But then again, if you have 20 of these stuffies running at one time, it is possible that the computer would run slowly…
Maybe I can create multiple Apple event listeners… I can see it now! The tiny blue bubbles all across the screen (wow).

5:21 AM – Goes downstairs to eat. Or at least try to.

6:17 AM – Left the house

7:00 AM – Arrived at the school

7:10 AM – No one is here, and there’s nothing to do, much o_o

4:30 PM – Awards ceremony

8:10 PM – Arrived home

All I can really say is that I’m extremely disappointed in the MRSTF – no comments from the judges (there were FIVE judges), 2 of them didn’t speak my language, and I’m sure even more didn’t even READ the report. How can I go from a project, last year – that compared a light sensor and touch sensor – to this whole Robbie Robot and do worse? It has so many possible future uses! I wasted A LOT of time, and more importantly I wasted A LOT of other people’s time. I did worse than failure, in my eyes. So if we learn from failure… does that mean I learned close to the ultimate answer? Lol!

That’s pretty much the way I am thinking about it. I have the ultimate answer, so I’m still going to work on robotics – but you’ll pretty much have to pay me to do another science fair after this one — or at least ensure that the judges are qualified. I’m planning to work on Robbie until I get to version 500. (By version 500 I hope to have continuous speech recognition). ^_^ Yay!

I’m going to go to the store today to get a bigger breadboard and some wires – and some squishy things… I’m going to make my own Keepon… I’m thinking of a pink snowman! With glitter! Haha.

Congrats to everyone that participated!

But, just to put this whole experience in perspective in one sentence- they stole our support our troops sticker off of our car.